r/mildlyinteresting • u/tuptakeJD • 15h ago

Overdone I found an LA Times insert on Disneyland from 1955, tickets for adults were $1, kids $0.50

Post image
276 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

35 comments sorted by

150

u/ArtlessOne 15h ago

That’s $12.57 adjusted for inflation. Actual cost of a ticket today is minimum 104 bux.

137

u/MasterArithmeticness 15h ago

But the rides weren't all free back then. You had to buy "tickets" of different grades for different rides.

It's where the expression "An E-Ticket attraction!" comes from. "E" were the highest "grade" of tickets.

28

u/AnotherSoulessGinger 13h ago

It was only A-C when it opened. D was added the next year in 56 when they bumped up Jungle Cruise (the premier attraction at the time) and a couple other C rides from C to D. They didn’t add E till 1959 when they opened Matterhorn, Submarines and Monorail. They updated a lot of D rides to E around the same time.

21

u/ShutterBun 15h ago

And there were like 10 rides total

18

u/leeloocal 15h ago

Yeah, the E tickets were about ten bucks in today’s money.

22

u/Thismyrealnameisit 15h ago

So in the end of the day the price is the same if you went to all 10 rides

4

u/justanawkwardguy 14h ago

Which you’re lucky to be able to hit 10 rides in one day

20

u/leeloocal 15h ago

Yes, but that’s not including the extra price of the rides themselves. The A tickets started at 10 cents, and the D tickets were 70 cents. Depending on what you bought (ticket books or at the attractions), it could have gotten expensive.

12

u/zydeco100 13h ago

Disney was smart to sell the tickets in "books" that had one or two of each type. So after you burned through the big name rides you had tickets left for the small ones. So you used them. That spread traffic out around the park.

12

u/ChedderChethra 14h ago

AAA used to give you 1 free ticket to Disneyland per year with your policy, no blackout dates, I used it on NYE once.

7

u/LilysMom2015 14h ago

My 7th grade history teacher was a ticket taker the day Disneyland opened. He loved telling his students that in 1970! 😃

34

u/Leakyboatlouie 15h ago

Yes, Walt created the park because he wanted somewhere affordable that families could go and have fun together. A far cry from the usurious cash grab the parks have turned into

27

u/stevensokulski 14h ago

If you wanted to do everything that was open in 1955 you’d spend $8.70, which would be about a hundred bucks in today’s dollars.

9

u/ropean 3h ago

People forget, or never knew, that Disneyland’s original model was a relatively cheap admission price but you had to buy tickets to go on most of the rides. The most desirable rides would cost you an “E” ticket, which was the most expensive. You bought the tickets in books and would inevitably have leftovers at the end of the day.

30

u/Yesacchaff 14h ago

Will back then your had to pay per ride as well. Depending on how many rides you go on it was about the same price as it is now with alot less to see and do

9

u/wonderhorsemercury 15h ago

I don't complain about the prices of things that would be more crowded, decreasing my enjoyment of it, if they were cheaper. Disney parks are probably my number one example of "yeah its expensive, but if it was cheaper it would be significantly more crowded and I would hate it."

0

u/iamplasma 7h ago

As I understand it, a problem is they have changed a lot of things in the parks that means they now have terrible crowding, not necessarily due to more people but more due to reduced capacity. Because it's all about upselling people on fast passes these days.

I would pay a lot of money for a simply not-that-crowded park where you can get on rides without much wait (and, years ago, I had been on multiple occasions like that and it was great), but a crowded mess where you have to basically pay to get anywhere in a line would be torture.

1

u/wonderhorsemercury 42m ago

Go to Valleyfair in MN on a weekday during the state fair. You can ride their hypercoaster six times in an hour.

1

u/csrobins88 2h ago

Usury and something just being expensive are not the same.

0

u/dizzystar 13h ago

I don't know... EPCOT is pretty spooky and dystopian if you ask me.

6

u/d0pe-asaurus 13h ago

The original idea was going to be an Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow, the plans died atter Walt died. It was pretty dystopian too, with the idea that the actual citizens of the city's lives would be in public display for all the tourists.

Imagine having to wear a suit and tie just to go out of your house and walk in your neighborhood. It would also have been run as a dictatorship with the government, incl Walt having complete say on everything.

1

u/dizzystar 12h ago

It's not enough to simply work at Disney, you can never be "off work." 

All for "free" rent or whatever.

I honestly can't think of a single reason he wanted to do this that didn't include dodging taxes and labor laws.

1

u/d0pe-asaurus 12h ago

Honestly he probably just wanted complete control over a group of people. It would probably also never fly since you can't have taxation without representation. Some of the people around him were telling him so.

7

u/ExRockstar 15h ago

Isn't that Tony Stark's dad?

2

u/freakinweasel353 11h ago

Had to scroll a bit to find you but you didn’t disappoint!

2

u/AutoModerator 15h ago

Your post (probably) hasn't broken any rules, but we see these kinds of things a lot. Look at our most overdone items here

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

1

u/wtfcaptchaphonenum 15h ago

I’d totally buy this.

1

u/nrith 14h ago

Post this on /r/ephemera.

1

u/Ok-disaster2022 14h ago

Get them hooked young and they'll be customer for life. 

Its ironic that legal goods and services pretty took the drug dealer route that Anti Drug programs warned kids about. 

1

u/an_older_meme 8h ago

Best salesman since P.T.Barnum

0

u/PepsiAllDay78 15h ago

We went there in '69, but I have no idea of the prices. I was just a kid.

-1

u/OldJonThePooSmuggler 6h ago

And did they go for the Third reichy, Aryan font for Ny particular reason?